Posts tagged math
The Shocking Failure of British Rail ...
A British train approaches a station. Image: Ingy the Wingy, via flickr.
I spent about a month in the UK earlier this summer, and that meant I took a lot of train trips. I love riding trains: the feeling of endless possibility I get when I look at the departure boards, the countryside rolling by, the fantastic people-watching, the two-hour de [...]
Fermi Estimation with Liquid Mercury ...
Stick figures jumping on Rhode Island, part of an xkcd what-if post by Randall Munroe.
The semester is over (sorry, quarter system folks, but you can get your revenge in August and September), and you just want to put your feet up and surf the Internet. Of course, there are lots of ways you might accidentally learn something while you do that [...]
Sniffing Out Theorems
Hector the dog is probably not sniffing out theorems. Image: SaudS, via Wikimedia Commons.
Patrick Stevens is an undergraduate mathematics student at the University of Cambridge, and I’ve really been enjoying his blog recently. He’s been doing a series of posts about discovering proofs of standard real analysis theorems. He writes that the se [...]
On Teaching Analysis
Timothy Gowers, University of Cambridge mathematician and Fields Medalist, is teaching an analysis class this term, and fortunately for me, he’s blogging about it. Analysis IA is part of the first-year math major sequence at the University of Cambridge, and it is a rigorous approach to calculus at the undergraduate level. I am teaching a simi [...]
Why Should We Fund Math Research?
Image: Nick Eres, via flickr.
Cathy O’Neil of mathbabe.org has been writing about how MOOCs might change the face of math departments and, ultimately, how math research gets funded. O’Neil is concerned that without calculus classes to teach, math research funding could dry up unless we do a better job convincing the public and funding agencie [...]
Collective Nouns for Mathematicians
A “proof” of mathematicians at the 2013 Joint Mathematics Meetings in San Diego. Image: American Mathematical Society.
Every once in a while I stumble on an interesting collective noun, usually for animals: a parliament of owls, a knot of toads, an exaltation of larks. I’ll be at the Joint Math Meetings this week with severa [...]
Hypocycloids
Rolling rolling rolling, hypocycloids rolling… Image: Greg Egan.
A John Baez blog post about hypocycloids will lovely animations by Greg Egan made my week and inspired two blog posts.
On the AMS Blog on Math Blogs, I wrote about math that’s illustrated with animated gifs. On Roots of Unity, I wrote about the hypocycloids themselve [...]
The Heidelberg Laureate Forum
A panorama of Heidelberg. Image: Coolgarriv, via Flickr.
The first-ever Heidelberg Laureate Forum is taking place this week. It’s modeled after the decades-old Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings, which bring together Nobel Laureates and young researchers for a conference on a particular topic. Mathematics and computer science are not repres [...]
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